It’s been a long, long time since I posted an excerpt (or anything else, for that matter) on the blog. In a figurative, internet-posting sense, I’m a terrible juggler; if I’m updating my newsletter regularly (and I have been), I’m neglecting my blog. If I’m blogging regularly, I’m probably neglecting something else. I can keep maybe one-and-a-half balls in the air at once. Anyway, like I said, the newsletter’s gotten regular updates, including monthly excerpts. Not everyone is a newsletter-reading human, so I’m going to start adding them to the blog, and maybe my (also neglected) Ko-fi page.
All that said, here’s an excerpt from the revision of Stars Fall Out:
In a few long steps, my father crossed the distance from the kitchen and pushed the door shut. A final breath of snow puffed in on the sound of bells.
My father’s palm stayed pressed up against the door, above my reach. “Your sister and I have an understanding. She’s well aware that she must keep up with her duties here, or she won’t be studying that magic anymore.”
“And if she doesn’t show up? Or if she leaves?”
“Then I especially need you here. We need the money, Tyatavar. Why do you think I’ve been running around, teaching these classes? Leaving my daughter to run my bakery when she should be worrying about starting her own life?”
Starting her own life. At those words, I could almost feel the letter in my pocket, like a bee on my shoulder or a heated blush spreading onto my cheeks.
“Will you please come back in?” Finally, my father dropped his hand from the door. An act of trust that I wouldn’t bolt.
That act of trust froze me as surely as the statues of Yinar and Nirsua, but where they had been sculpted of stone, I chiseled my own stillness out of flesh and blood and fire that burned in my spirit, even as a paper in my pocket had already gone to ash.